Abstract

Even if it is indeed impossible to consider Pasolin’s « Salo » as an illustration of Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, we should not treat the film as merely a schematization or a betrayal of the book, as one often hears. Pasolini uses the « reference » to Sade as a « tool, » in all its ambiguity, with which to demonstrate and dismantle the consequences of the paradoxical logic of the Enlightenment, i. e. its utilitarian and hedonistic ethics. Sexuality considered as pure consumption becomes the device and the instrument of power and destruction. Salô’s target is not fascism in its historical form, but rather its derivative, still invisible form in consumer society, which leads to the collapsing of the body and eros in the language of communication and the integral transparency of affects